Open System for Geniuses - by Chronostalker

Psychopathy is another interesting subject:

“Psychopaths are notorious for not answering the questions asked them. They will answer something else, or in such a way that the direct question is never addressed. They also phrase things so that some parts of their narratives are difficult to understand. This is not careless speech, of which everyone is guilty at times, but an ongoing indication of the underlying condition in which the organization of mental activity suggests something is wrong. It’s not what they say, but how they say it that gives insight into their true nature.

But this raises, again, the question: if their speech is so odd, how come smart people get taken in by them? Why do we fail to pick up the inconsistencies?

Part of the answer is that the oddities are subtle so that our general listening mode will not normally pick them up. But my own experience is that some of the “skipped” or oddly arranged words, or misused words are automatically reinterpreted by OUR brains in the same way we automatically “fill in the blank” space on a neon sign when one of the letters has gone out. We canbe driving down the road at night, and ahead we see M_tel, and we mentally put the “o” in place and read “Motel.” Something like this happens between the psychopath and the victim. We fill in the “missing humanness” by filling in the blanks with our own assumptions, based on what WE think and feel and mean. And, in this way, because there are these “blank” spots, we fill them in with what is
inside us, and thus we are easily convinced that the psychopath is a great guy - because he is just like us! We have been conditioned to operate on trust, and we always try to give the “benefit of the doubt.” So, there are blanks, we “give the benefit of the doubt,” and we are thereby hoisted on our own petard.

Psychopaths view any social exchange as a “feeding opportunity,” a contest or a test of wills in which there can be only one winner. Their motives are to manipulate and take, ruthlessly and without remorse. [Hare]

http://www.hare.org/

At the present moment in history, the appeal of the psychopath has never been greater. Movies about psychopaths are all the rage. Hare asks “Why? What accounts for the terrific power that the personality without conscience has over our collective imagination?

One theorist proposes that people who admire, believe, or identify with psychopaths, are partly psychopathic themselves. By interacting with a psychopath, even peripherally, they are able to voyeuristically enjoy an
inner state not dominated by the constraints of morality. Such people are enabled to enjoy aggressive and sexual pleasures at no cost.

For normal people, such movies may serve to remind them of the danger and destructiveness of the psychopath. They will shiver with the sense of something cold and dark having breathed on their neck. For others, people
with poorly developed inner selves, such movies and glorification of psychopathic behavior only serves as a role model for serious acts of violence and predation against others.

The only difference that family background seems to make is how the psychopath expresses himself. A psychopath who grows up in a stable family and has access to positive social and educational resources might become a white-collar criminal, or perhaps a somewhat shady entrepreneur, politician, lawyer, judge, or other professional. Another individual with the same traits, and a deprived background might become a common con-artist, a drifter, mercenary, or violent criminal.

The point is, social factors and parenting practices only shape the expression of the disorder, but have no effect on the individual’s inability to feel empathy or to develop a conscience.

Robert Hare once submitted a paper to a scientific journal. The paper included EEGs of several groups of adult men performing a language task. The editor of the journal returned the paper saying “Those EEG’s couldn’t have come from real people.”

But they did. They were the EEG’s of psychopaths.

Some people have compared psychopathy to schizophrenia. However, there is a crucial distinction as we will see:

Schizophrenia and psychopathy are both characterized by impulsive, poorly planned behavior. This behavior may originate from a weak or poorly coordinated response inhibition system. We tested the hypothesis that
schizophrenia and psychopathy are associated with abnormal neural processing during the suppression of inappropriate responses.

The participants were schizophrenic patients, nonpsychotic psychopaths, and nonpsychotic, nonpsychopathic control subjects (defined by the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised), all incarcerated in a maximum security psychiatric facility. We recorded behavioral responses and event-related potentials (ERPs) during a
Go/No Go task.

Results: Schizophrenic patients made more errors of commission than did the nonpsychopathic offenders. As expected, the nonpsychopathic nonpsychotic participants showed greater frontal ERP negativity (N275) to the No Go stimuli than to the Go stimuli. This effect was small in the schizophrenic patients and absent in the psychopaths. For the nonpsychopaths, the P375 ERP component was larger on Go than on No Go trials, a difference that was absent in schizophrenicpatients and in the opposite direction in psychopaths.

Conclusions: These findings support the hypothesis that the neural processes involved in response inhibition are abnormal in both schizophrenia and psychopathy; however, the nature of these processes appears to be different in the two disorders.

“More and more data are leading to the conclusion that psychopathy has a biological basis, and has many features of a disease,” says Sabine Herpertz, a psychiatrist at the RWTH-Aachen University in Germany.

The brain imaging techniques of positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) provide the opportunity to investigate psychopathy further. They might allow researchers to discover whether
psychopaths’ physiological and emotional deficits can be pinned down to specific differences in the anatomy or activation of the brain.

Among researchers who are starting to explore this area, there are two main theories of psychopathy. One, championed by Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and supported by the work of Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa, gives a starring role to a brain region called the orbitofrontal cortex (see diagram, below). This is part of an area of the brain, known as the prefrontal cortex, involved in conscious decision-making.

The other theory, promoted by James Blair of University College London, holds that the fundamental dysfunction lies within the amygdala, a small almond-shaped structure that plays a critical role in processing emotion and mediating fear. Recently, using PET scanning, Blair has shown that activation of
the amygdala in normal volunteers is involved in responding to the sadness and anger of others, and he hypothesizes that amygdala dysfunction could explain the lack of fear and empathy in psychopaths.

The two theories may not be mutually exclusive, Blair points out, as the orbitofrontal cortex, which does the ‘thinking’, and the amygdala, which does the ‘feeling’, are highly interconnected.

Following widespread concern that the criminal justice and mental health systems are failing to deal effectively with dangerous psychopaths, there is a movement in several countries to instigate fundamental legal reform. The most controversial suggestion is to make it possible for individual who have severe personality disorders to be detained in secure mental institutions even if they have been accused of no crime. Although these particular provisions have alarmed civil liberties campaigners, the raft of measures also includes a major initiative within the prison service to improve the handling of those with APD–including psychopaths.

According to one individual who suffered at the hands of a psychopath:

“The World has only one problem, Psychopaths. There are two basic types of Psychopaths, Social and Anti-Social. The essential feature of Psychopaths is a Pervasive, Obssesive- Compulsive desire to force their delusions on others. Psychopaths completely disregard and violate the Rights of others, particularly the Freedom of Association which includes the right not to associate and the Right to Love.”

And we have come full circle. Over and over again we come up against that little problem: religion and belief systems that have to be defended against objective evidence or the beliefs of others. We have to ask ourselves “where did these belief systems come from that so evidentially are catastrophic?” And then, we have to think about the fact that now, in the present day, when many of these systems are breaking down and being replaced by others that similarly divert our attention away from what IS, it becomes necessary to “enforce” a certain mode of thinking. And that is what Psychopaths do best.

Psychopaths dominate and set the standard for behavior in our society. We live in a world based on a psychopathic, energy stealing food chain, because that’s just the way things are. Most people are so damaged they no longer have the capacity to even imagine a different system based on a symbiotic network.

They are not only damaged by others, but also by the thousand little evils they have done to others to survive. For them to see the system for what it is, would require them to see the part they have played in perpetuating it. That is a lot to ask of a fragile ego. Also, those who are not psychopaths, still want to make human connections but are afraid to, for fear of being taken advantage of and stolen from energeticaly speaking.

With the brief historical review we have examined, we are acutely aware that this is NOT a phenomenon confined to our present “time.” It is a trans-millennial evolutionary strategy that, step by step, has brought us to our present position. What emerges in the present day is just Machiavellian diversion that focuses the attention of those who are easily deceived. This is reinforced by the “clappers” in the audience, and there seems to be an entire army of psychopaths among us whose job it is act as vectors of attention and direction. We hope that the readers of these pages will give themselves permission to imagine, research and implement a different way of being. And to stand up for themselves while doing it.

The great British Civil List Scientist, Myron W. Evans has discovered not only the Grand Unified Field Theory . He has disovered also this blog! So, let us examine his new discovery. According to my usually well informed friends MWE wrote:

“MWE: There is a garbage website by “chronostalker”, who deos not have the courage to debate with me directly or to reveal who he or she is, or even to inform me of the existence of his or her garbage website. ”

Well, what is considered to be garbage and what not is highly subjective. Some scientists think that MWE “papers” contain quite a bit of garbage. But MWE is not willing to admit his errors. Those who have “courage” to write to MWE directly are being threatened by him. They are being personally and professionally harassed.

“MWE: It is this kind of public trashing of an innocent person that needs to be punished heavily under the new
net laws. ”

So, here we have an example. If scientific criticism is not allowed, then it it is the end of science.

“MWE: This site continues the “Evans is an idiot” game and I have been aware of it for some time. ”

No one says “Evans is an idiot”. To decide whether someone is an idiot, and, if so, what kind of an idiot, a psychiatric expertise is needed. This blog offers only a scientific expertise. It is not about Evans, but about errors in his papers, and about Evans’ behavior that is not in accord with the scientific ethics.

“MWE: Lar Felker kindly came to my defence and was also also trashed personally by Bruhn for his honesty. For example it is claimed by the venerable stalker of time that r = x i + y j + z k is not a straight line because it is a vector, and in an immediately following note it is claimed that a unit vector makes no sense because it is a tautology.”

Certainly r = x i + y j + z k is not a straight line. A straight line has infinitely many points, while r = x i + y j + z k is just one point. While it is true that there is exactly one straight line through the origin in the direction of any given vector, in mathematics it is absolutely crucial to distinguish between a vector and line through the origin in the direction of this vector. Otherwise lot of confusion happens, and the more ambitious is a given theory, the more crucial is avoiding elementary mathematical errors.

“MWE: It is then concluded that Evans is an idiot who knows nothing about vectors at all. ”

While it is hard to say why MWE is making these elementary mistakes and is unwilling to have them pointed to him, so that he could fix them, the fact is that MWE does not understand a difference between a vector and straight line in the direction of this vector. Hopefully someone will be able to explain this to him. But it is really hard, when Evans only replies are by threatening his friends lawsuits. I say “friends”, because those who are pointing errors is someone’s papers should be considered as friends, not as enemies.

“MWE: Coming back to the real world we all know from school that a polar vector defined as above must be a straight line in 3-D Euclidean space”

And this is wrong. A vector is NOT a straight line. These two mathematical concepts have different definitions. This is explained already in elementary schools on the continent. I do not know how it is in USA or in GB.

“MWE: and we all know that i, j and k are unit vectors. ”

No, we do not know for sure. But we can guess that it is indeed the case. Nevertheless a vector is not the same as the straight line through the origin, and in the direction of this vector. Question is what are x,y,z that enter the formula r = x i + y j + z k. For instance, if we assume that x=0, y=0, z=t, t being a “variable” in the range -infinity, +infinity, then, indeed, we have a straight line. But if we assume t being a variable in the range 0,+infinity, then we have a half-line. Finally, if we assume that t is just a number, then we have a point. And if we assume that x,y,z run through the set of all integeres, then we have a cubic lattice!

“MWE: So we are all idiots and so are all the staff of “Vector Analysis Problem Solver”.”

Vector Analysis Problem Solver is not a good place to learn elementary mathematics. More basic education is needed.

“Needless to write, Bruhn quotes “chronostalker”. With supporters like this, who needs comedians? ”

One could write a mathematical comedy based on the subject “vector is a straight line”. But not, this is not comic. This is simply an elementary error. Instead of writing about comedians, MWE should simply correct his papers, and thanks to those who pointed errors in them. I guess it should not take too much of his time.

“With all due respect to Sanskrit, Mayan and Tibetan cultures, resonance was not inferred mathematically until 1739 (in Europe), and vectors were invented by Heaviside until the end of the nineteenth century (again in Europe).

According to Wikipedia: “Vector analysis has its origin in quaternion analysis, and was formulated by the American scientist, J. Willard Gibbs ”

“MWE: I think it is very necessary to expose Bruhn as a foul mouthed fraud, and necessary to draw attention to him through the Widlar Committee, and from his Dean and President, offering him a letter of resignation, or a letter firing him outright. If this is not done we know that the Dean and President support garbage scientists on
their faculty. These are all highly paid by the working taxpayers of the EEC.”

Here we have again Evans’ invitation to “debate with him directly”.

That is enough about vectors, straight lines and “garbage scientists”. Recently another subject drew my attention, namely that of “the psychopaths”